Dead End Thrills brings a whole new perspective to “games as art”

Duncan Harris is a gamer just like the rest of us. He spends hours playing, and looking at, some of the best games of this generation. Games are, coincidentally, often the products of large teams of creators and artists, coming together to develop backgrounds, environments, characters, and style. His understanding of the medium as a visual art form, not just a story-telling or experiential one, combined with his knowledge of software and graphics tweaking led him to create the blog Dead End Thrills.

With DET, Harris focuses on stripping away HUDs, characters, animations and more to create landscape-style scenes from some of the biggest games of the past decade. Using several imaging software and hardware tweaks, as well as source code and emulators, Harris creates “perfect” shots from games like Bulletstorm, Portal 2, Mirror’s Edge, and more. And, not by coincidence, they’re all stunning.

Have a look at the blog, where he’s even listed the steps and tools necessary to recreate several of the images.

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http://majamaki.com Terry Majamaki

I discovered Dead End Thrills back when I wrote my review on Deus Ex: Human Revolution on my blog @ http://majamaki.com/ – ever since I’ve started following Dead End Thrills regularly to see the latest screens he posts, they are always impressive. He’s got a great eye for detail.